The long nightmare has almost reached its end. Chuck Austen only has one issue of X-MEN left to go.

But George W Bush is sticking around. If I'd realised it was a choice, I'd have opted for four more years of reviewing Chuck Austen. I'm self-sacrificing like that.

But this is not an American politics website. Come to think of it, this isn't even an American website. But since US publishers still dominate the UK market, we don't get to dodge America entirely. If nothing else, we can be confident that the next four years will see plenty more stories about America's favourite subject: America.

The election has made it painfully apparent that the USA is a deeply divided and polarised country. That would have remained the case whoever had won. 51% to 48% is undeniably a mandate, but a close one. The geographical split is also undeniable. Whether religious and moral issues were the deciding factor in the election is highly debatable, but the cultural divide is clearly there. Watching from the outside, the impression one gets is of two cultures that neither like, respect nor understand one another, and have no real interest in trying. This holds true for both sides; for every liberal sneering about redneck hicks, there's a right-winger ranting about liberal elitists. There seems to be a remarkable lack of common ground.

In theory this shouldn't be such a big problem for the USA, especially because of that convenient geographical divide. The USA is, after all, a federal country. The whole bloody point of federal countries is that the states can go their own way and everyone's happy. But we all know that's not going to happen. Instead, we have a US government that will pursue the agenda of one of those cultures. For all the talk of a bipartisan approach, Bush claimed to be a unity candidate last time round, and he plainly wasn't. 'Bipartisan', for modern Republicans, seems to be little more than a euphemism for, "shut up and support the government".

I'm coming to comics in a bit. Stick with me.

'The next four years will see plenty more stories about America.' The point is: the clash between these two sides of American culture is going to be a dominant part of the national narrative for the next few years. This is what the next few years are going to be about, since it's highly unlikely that the 48% of Americans who voted against Bush are going to get any less angry about him, and the White House's conservative agenda is going to be on a collision course with them. Cue conflict.

Conflict is good. We like conflict. Conflict is the essence of drama. It makes for fantastic stories. It's even better when the conflict happens in foreign countries, like the USA. I get to sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the blood fly. It's much more interesting than Scottish politics, which usually involves two people called Morag arguing about the cost of bricks.

And since it's a major cultural issue, and full of conflict, it should guarantee plenty of great stories about the subject! It's a gift to writers! Right?

The Pulse did a survey of comics creators recently, asking who they would be voting for in the election. Surprise surprise, the overwhelming majority were voting for Kerry. You could have done the same survey in almost every creative field and you would have got the same answer. If you're looking for stories from the liberal perspective, you're not exactly going to have much trouble finding them. If you want stories from the other side... well, I hear Chuck Dixon's quite prolific.

To say that comics creators are not representative of the US public would be a gross understatement. Of course, this is hardly the only way in which they don't match the wider demographic. There aren't many women either. Or black people. Still, the political weighting towards the left applies in most media and most countries. When the right complain that the media are biased against them, they're generally wrong. But when they say that drama and fiction are weighted against them, they've got a point.

'The overwhelming majority or creators surveyed were voting for Kerry.' It's not that the right are unrepresented in the media. They have plenty of presence in the news media, and far outweigh the left in talk radio (a medium where American liberals have proved remarkably useless). Admittedly, there must be plenty of right-wing Americans who would rather be represented by somebody a little less punchable than Bill O'Reilly. Having these bozos as the public face of right-wing America doesn't exactly boost its reputation with anyone else, either. Still, it's right-wing media, and it gets a huge audience. They're there. They just don't have much of a presence in the arts.

Personally, I think the main reason is perfectly innocuous. The sort of people who are inclined to pursue creative careers lean heavily towards a particular personality type. Those people also tend to be much more receptive to left-wing thinking - or whatever the left happens to be in their culture, since the American left is still somewhere to the right of most European countries. This has nothing to do with artists having some kind of access to a higher truth, by the way. Equally, you don't get many anarchists pursuing careers as lawyers or merchant bankers.

Artistic types tend to a sort of groupthink in various ways, and a general leftward tilt is only one of them. The most obvious is an overwhelming belief in the importance of art, something that isn't actually shared all that widely in the general population. I've lost count of the number of stories I've seen about the life-affirming power of poetry or storytelling, something that no doubt reflects the experience of many creators and devoted readers, but has bugger all to do with the life of most of the population.

This raises an interesting point, in that art and culture don't really reflect the wider culture at all, merely the views of that part who choose to participate in it. Which does kind of cast a question mark over the relevance of the whole exercise, or at least its status as "culture". But I digress.

'People who pursue creative careers lean heavily towards a particular personality type.' All of this means that it is virtually impossible for most artistic media, including comics, to actually represent the current cultural conflict as any sort of two-sided debate. Not only are its practitioners overwhelmingly on one side, but they don't even really understand the guys on the other side. Who, in turn, don't understand them either.

Brace yourself, then, for an avalanche of preaching-to-the-choir anti-Bush stories. Of course, that sort of thing has its place, but it's not exactly going to advance the cause of greater understanding. I've never really gone in for rabble-rousing, myself, and most of this sort of thing tends to annoy me even when I agree with it. A lot of people liked Mark Millar's run on AUTHORITY, for example, but I got the distinct impression of a writer and his audience congratulating one another on being liberals.

Frankly, when I read this stuff, I can understand where the right-wing stereotype of smug, arrogant Guardian-readers comes from. It's the mirror image of everything we loathe when the right do it. I can't stand it, for god's sake, and I'm a European liberal. What must the typical right-wing voter in Alabama make of it?

Oh, and just in case anyone's thinking of pitching it: "Captain America quits in protest at the US government" has already been done. Twice.

With neither right-wing writers nor many people who understand the right, comics and the other arts are going to give us an unavoidably one-sided view of the next few years. There's no real way around that. But please, at least give us something a little more illuminating than endless variations on "Those guys suck".

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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